ll minds
were necessarily in agreement.

Well, to what dogma do all minds agree? to the worship of a God and to
integrity. All the philosophers of the world who have had a religion
have said in all time--"There is a God, and one must be just." There,
then, is the universal religion established in all time and throughout
mankind.

The point in which they all agree is therefore true, and the systems
through which they differ are therefore false.

"My sect is the best," says a Brahmin to me. But, my friend, if your
sect is good, it is necessary; for if it were not absolutely necessary
you would admit to me that it was useless: if it is absolutely
necessary, it is for all men; how then can it be that all men have not
what is absolutely necessary to them? How is it possible for the rest of
the world to laugh at you and your Brahma?

When Zarathustra, Hermes, Orpheus, Minos and all the great men say--"Let
us worship God, and let us be just," nobody laughs; but everyone hisses
the man who claims that one cannot please God unless when one dies one
is holding a cow's tail, and the man who wants one to have the end of
one's prepuce cut off, and the man who consecrates crocodiles and
onions, and the man who attaches eternal salvation to the dead men's
bones one carries under one's shirt, or to a plenary indulgence which
one buys at Rome for two and a half sous.

Whence comes this universal competition in hisses and derision from one
end of the world to the other? It is clear that the things at which
everyone sneers are not of a very evident truth. What shall we say of
one of Sejan's secretaries who dedicated to Petronius a bombastic book
entitled--"The Truths of the Sibylline Oracles, Proved by the Facts"?

This secretary proves to you first that it was necessary for God to send
on earth several sibyls one after the other; for He had no other means
of teaching mankind. It is demonstrated that God spoke to these sibyls,
for the word _sibyl_ signifies _God's counsel_. They had to live a long
time, for it is the very least that persons to whom God speaks should
have this privilege. They were twelve in number, for this number is
sacred. They had certainly predicted all the events in the world, for
Tarquinius Superbus bought three of their Books from an old woman for a
hundred crowns. "What incredulous fellow," adds the secretary, "will
dare deny all these evident facts which happened in a corner before the
whole world? Who can